PodShow, the San Francisco-based online-video network best known for launching the career of CNET's Natali Del Conte, is laying off about 20 employees, or as much as 30 percent of its staff. "There are no secrets, only information you don't yet have," is the slogan for former MTV VJ Adam Curry's podcast. Curry, a PodShow cofounder, didn't show up to deliver information about the firings; we're told he left that to middle managers.

With Curt Viebranz out, AOL's new advertising boss Lynda Clarizio plans to integrate the Time Warner subsidiary's various ad sales teams — those from acquisitions Tacoda and Quigo, for example — into one. That will create redundancies which Clarizio plans to handle by axing about half of AOL's sales force, Silicon Alley Insider reports. Top executives at Advertising.com will fill new roles running all of advertising for AOL.

Buried in CEO Eric Schmidt's blog post about the company's greenlighted acquisition of DoubleClick:

Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported Ask.com would become a search engine for midwestern women. But now the "Marge Simpson Plan" — as our Ask tipster calls it — is off. Apparently, Ask CEO Jim Safka changed his mind over the weekend and executives spent all day Sunday scrambling to put together a new plan. Our tipster blames the confusion on Safka's secretive nature, telling us that when he comes into work his office door is always closed. The silence has once loyal employee feeling apathetic and looking for jobs elsewhere.

As Barry Diller curtails both Ask.com's ambitions and its workforce, his hired hand is turning it into the Home Shopping Network of search engines. CEO Jim Safka says 65 percent of its users are female with a high concentration in their late 30s in the Midwest and Southeast. In an attempt to try to get also-ran search site back on track, Safka is laying off eight percent of Ask's employees and "reevaluating" its strategy. "Everything we do will be put through this strategic filter," he says. At last, a search engine that plays in Peoria. The only problem is that even Midwestern housewives know how to Google.

Word has it Yahoo laid off European communications execs Alex Laity, David Sawday (pictured) and Lola Banos. Just in time for lobbying the EU to block a Microsoft takeover, our tipster notes.

Is the ax falling at Ask.com? "There is indeed a big shakeup coming," a tipster tells Silicon Alley Insider, seeming to corroborate layoff rumors we reported earlier.

Sam Zell is the charismatic CEO of the Tribune Company. Charismatic in a way only journalists would appreciate, which means he's always cursing about something. It's amazing how a quick "fuck you" has kept his staff charmed. But after yesterday's Newsday cuts, Sam Zell's "Fuck Yous" are more than straight talk—he's really going to fuck his employees.

"This place was buzzing today that there will be layoffs here soon," an Ask.com employee tips us off. The tipster complains that since completing "a bunch of tests for new ways to make money, no one in my group has seen or heard from management [since] they had a pizza lunch the first week of January." It's the second Ask layoff rumor we've heard this month.

Rebecca Aronauer, a former writer on gossip blog Jossip, is guesting on Gawker for the next month. She'll be covering print media, though Rebecca would much rather muse on Brooklyn neighborhoods. And they say newspapers can't adapt to web culture. Why, the Washington Post even converted the smokers' room, which has been unused for years, into a game room. With foosball, air hockey and Wii, Washington Post writers are sure not to feel demoralized about sinking ad sales and the larger downturn in the publishing industry. And if the game room fails to inspire the staff, they can always turn it into a drinking room. Or just skip the ruse and turn the whole office into a bar. [Washington City Paper]

Nortel, the second-rung maker of telecom equipment, is losing money. In an attempt to stop doing that, the company is firing 3,100 workers. Of course, that's not how Nortel PR is spinning it. The AP reports: "The company said it plans to cut about 2,100 jobs globally and will shift approximately 1,000 additional jobs to lower-cost areas." Even with our mere powers of journalist math, we can calculate that the company is really firing 3,100 employees and hiring 1,000 more for lower pay — a likely euphemism for "shifting jobs overseas."

Sony laid off eight people from its video site Crackle.com today, one former employee tells us. Crackle was called Grouper when Sony bought it for $50 million in August 2006. And though Grouper was founded a year before YouTube, the headstart didn't help much. Check out the chart below.

Having unloaded itself of 1,000-some employees, Yahoo is now hiring almost half that number back. Yahoo's careers site has 459 open positions. So much for cost-saving layoffs.

I once saw the first twenty of minutes of this horror movie. Can't remember the name. But it starts with a bunch of teenagers heading out on a road trip to the beach. As they merge onto the highway, a horrific pile-up goes down all around them. The camera hops around showing how each person dies. I remember, for example, a truck dropping a log from its flatbed trailer and the thing going through a windshield. Splat. Blood on broken glass. But then the main character snaps out of it and realizes it was all a dream. She and her friends are still waiting at the highway onramp. Scared witless, our protagonist refuses to drive on. And then, the car accident she presaged actually happens. Later, all the people who would have died in the accident gather at the police station. A creepy kid in the corner warns them: On this very day last year, some guy dreamed an airplane would go down and he and his friends refused to board. The airplane went down. He died anyway. So did all his friends. Creepy kid says: Death will get us all. Then for the rest of the movie it does. Anyway, don't know why I brought this up, but here's a list of names Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz thanked on his way out.

A list of laid-off Yahoo executives, as well as those who exited around the same time Yahoo made cuts. Any additions? [Silicon Alley Insider]

A tipster corrects our math. Severance pay and "related cash expenditures" will cost Yahoo a surprisingly low $25 million — because the company may not pay annual bonuses on March 14 to its 1,000-plus laid-off employees. The savings may range as high as $14 million, he estimates. Bonuses are always awarded at the discretion of managers — and why would they give a bonus to someone no longer with the company?

A tipster writes of the cuts at Yahoo: "Maria Hinge, the VP for emerging European markets, got laid off on Friday. She's credited with rolling out services in Turkey, Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic. However, her reports always thought she was more adept at 'rolling' with the European management team." Come on, people. "Rolling?" Does anyone actually say that? Next we're going to hear that Toby Coppel was swinging with the flippity-flop.

Severance pay and "related cash expenditures" will cost Yahoo between $20 million to $25 million, the company said in an SEC filing. Given that Yahoo laid off around 1,000 employees, crude math with these figures suggests laid-off Yahoos walked off with an average severance package of $20,000 to $25,000. Call it $7,500 a month for three months of severance pay. Annualized, that makes being a laid-off Yahoo a $90,000-a-year job.

With all the layoffs that just about every major newspaper has gone through over the past few years, reporting staffs have already been chopped to the bone. Or all the way through the bone and out the other side, in some cases. So when the next round of layoffs inevitably comes, where do the cuts come from? A provocative, insightful, and obvious idea: How about firing some more of those freaking editors? Or at least making them do a little more work.

For those of you who invested a lot of effort into preparing for a glamorous career in the media: Why not try marketing instead? Seriously. Because all the media jobs are pretty much disappearing. Ad Age finds in a new survey that a quarter of media jobs have evaporated since 2000. Where did they go? To marketing services, of course, which is actually expanding because of the Internet, whereas traditional media outlets (hello, newspapers) are being pummeled with layoffs because of the Internet. Fortunately, all those laid off reporters can get jobs pitching stories to their old colleagues; "Marketing consultancies over the past year added 14,500 jobs (up 10.8%), nearly matching staff cuts at newspapers (down 16,900 or 4.7%)." More depressing graphs of doom [via Ad Age] after the jump.